Dr. Jim Conway, a pediatric radiologist at Children`s Memorial Hospital, has been collecting for 12 years and has about 2,000 items, including maps, prints and a variety of ephemera.
Some of the highlights of his collection are gossip-type papers printed by Chicago prostitutes in the 1800s. ”I have all types of collections, from crime to a large collection on prostitution in Chicago. I have books on the financial history of Chicago.”
Asked why he collects, he says: ”My wife is a thrower-outer; I`m a collector. I was interested in coins when I was a newsboy. I lost interest in collecting in the `50s.
”Then I went back to medical school, and I was in a shop where I ran across paper money. I never knew individual banks issued their own currency prior to 1861, before the federal government started printing money. There was a lot of tomfoolery going on in that area, with wildcat banks opening up a hut in Michigan and trying to get people to buy their currency. I got interested in this and Chicago banks. I began to buy books to get into the financial history of Chicago.”
The turning point for him was the Lawrence Dickey Auction in 1977, where
”I was able to purchase a number of things related to my interests, pre-fire pamphlets and imprints. Dickey owned the Americana Shop at Dearborn and Chicago from 1920 to 1935 and was collecting Chicagoana before anybody else did it,” Conway explains. ”He died in his late 30s; the widow tried to carry on but retired and put the collection in the basement.
”For a collector of Chicagoana, pre-fire materials are very difficult to come by, and these materials have become very valuable. Much of Chicago`s history has been destroyed by devastating fires,” he says. ”There was one in 1868 that destroyed much of downtown Chicago and the Chicago Historical Society. In 1871 there was another fire that destroyed all the commercial aspects of Chicago, including many fine homes that contained libraries, and, again, the Chicago Historical Society.
”Chicago`s history has been destroyed time and time again; compared to any other city in the U.S., our history has been hard to bring together, and that`s fun,” Conway says.
To properly store his collection, ”I had to build a library; in fact, I had to build a bigger house in which the basement is being converted into a storage space.
”They`re probably taken as good care of as in a library,” he says. ”In fact, they`re probably taken better care of.
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”It is good to have a fair amount of humidity and stable temperatures because paper is wood, except for older paper, which is made of cloth and easier to preserve. You do need to have some concern about humidity and temperature. Humidity is more important, not to have too much or not to have none. (In the latter case) you don`t get invasion by fungus, but on the other hand the glue tends to disappear.
”I guess part of the fun of collecting is the hunt,” Conway says. ”You don`t have to be wealthy to do it. I don`t think I`ve spent more than a few dollars for the books I have; I go to house sales,” such as estate sales. –